Today we find out who is the hottest new act in the music business. According to The Guardian Florence and the Machine are the bookies’ favorites. I’m kind of hoping that Bat for Lashes gets it, though I didn’t think that Two Suns was anywhere near as good as Fur and Gold. I’m also rather fond of La Roux, if you want an outside pick.
Update: and the winner is… London-based rapper, Speech Debelle. The BBC has details.
Mott the Hoople getting back together again? Surely they are all dead…
Apparently not. Via Liz Hand I find this article in The Guardian. Now I’m wondering if I can get to London in early October. Anyone up for it?
In the meantime, here are the boys when they were much younger.
Thanks to Lou Anders I have discovered Sci Fi Songs, a blog by John Anealio that features songs inspired by SF&F books, movies and even blogs. I particularly like John’s song, “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch”, though there are also many I haven’t listened to yet. All of the music is original as well. As far as I can see, John isn’t aware of the filk community. I think I need to do some connecting.
I have posted the lyrics from this year’s Finncon filking. We have the following:
Airport security rules continue to confound me. Every other country I have visited has removed common cosmetics such as lipstick and mascara from their “dangerous terrorist weapons” list. Not so Australia. And yet their screening guys do not require you to remove shoes or even coats. Go figure.
The trip back to the UK was not nearly as convenient as the one going out, sleep-wise. After a domestic transfer from Melbourne we left Sydney at 5:00pm. That’s too early for sleep. We arrived in Bangkok at 2:00am, Sydney time, by which time I had got a few hours of sleep, and then had to be woken up to get off the plane. Sleeping on take-off was so easy I actually missed the food service (which was a Thai fish curry), but somewhere over Pakistan it became morning in Sydney and I was wide awake, even though it was midnight in London. That was BAD. Thankfully I have managed to sleep a bit more on the rest of the journey.
Bangkok is a weird experience. They encourage you to get off the plane while it is cleaned, but also encourage you to leave all of your cabin baggage behind due to delays at security. I guess if any of the cleaners tried to open one of the overhead bins it would be very obvious to the cabin crew. Anyway, all of my stuff was still there when I got back.
And now I am in London. There is a Tube strike on today, but thankfully I don’t need that service. I booked a midday train from Paddington, giving myself plenty of time for the flight to be late, but now have several hours to kill. As the toilets are Paddington are not accessible to people with luggage I’m staying at Heathrow. Starbucks has its uses.
QANTAS had Watchmen showing on their (very excellent) on demand movie service. Given what I have heard about movies cut for aircraft, I was rather surprised to see that most of the sex and graphic violence had been left in. Unfortunately the screen is much to small to allow you to look for interesting things in the background. That will have to wait for the DVD.
I also re-watched the music documentary, “The Roxy Music Story”. This reminds me that that the new album, which the boys were working on back in 2006/7, is still not out. Anyone know what has happened to this? Also has anyone else noticed that Eno is now the best-looking of the lot of them? Funny how age works, isn’t it.
To recap, when I went to Dublin last month Neil Gaiman kindly put me on the guest list for the Amanda Palmer gig, and one of the other guests was a chap called Peter Murphy. Neil told me that Peter was a really great writer, and his first novel had just been published. The following evening was spent in a bookstore. I did what comes naturally.
Which is how I came to be reading what is actually pretty much a mainstream novel. Literary, even, as the book deals primarily with the coming of age of a young man, and with escape from a small country town. These things are fairly common fare in the literary world. There is a certain amount of what you might call magic realism to the narrative, but it is very liminal and the book is not one that most genre readers would describe as fantasy.
Given that this is not the sort of book I normally read, I was delighted at how quickly and easily I got through it. I am reminded of the first time I visited Dublin, and discovered that the Guinness over there is so smooth and deceptive that you can consume several pints before you are aware of what you are doing. Thankfully, consuming John the Revelator in a couple of quick sittings did not result in anywhere near the unfortunate side-effects of over-indulgence in alcohol. Quite the opposite, in fact. Instead I found myself in awe of just how effortless the reading process had been. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Neil was dead right: Peter Murphy is a very good writer.
Should you be interested in trying the book, but are confused about the title, please note that it is not full of religious imagery and apocalyptic prophecy. As far as I can make out, the title simply refers to the fact that the John who is the central character in the book is fairly passive throughout, save for having some rather odd dreams, but does get to find out quite a lot about other people. Peter is a music journalist, and the title was apparently inspired by the famous American folk song (not the songs of the same name by the Dave Matthews Band and Depeche Mode). If you’d like to know more, there is an interview with Peter here and article about him here.
For some reason I am absurdly pleased that Peter credits Godspeed You Black Emperor! for inspiring part of the book, though of course I have to credit Marc Gascoigne here, from whom all of my best music discoveries spring.
There will be a US edition of the book, but it is not due out until August.
Thanks to the generosity of Neil and Amanda, and the help of Amanda’s colleague, Beth, I have been able to add some artwork to my video diary of the Dublin reading. Now you can not only listen to Neil reading, and Amanda singing, but also view a variety of Amanda corpses. There is some very fine photography in the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book – much of it by Kyle Cassidy, who it turns out has a more direct connection to the SF community as his last LJ post saw him enthusing over getting to meet the likes of Ellen Datlow, Michael Swanwick and Greg Frost.
Anyway, the whole diary, now complete with dead Amandas, can be viewed here.
It seems that there is a gene for everything these days, including being happy. According to The Guardian, psychologists at Essex University claim to have discovered a gene that helps people have a positive attitude to life. I must admit that this is one of those occasions when I am deeply suspicious of science reporting in national newspapers, but a gene that helps the body resist whatever chemical malfunction results in depression doesn’t appear impossible.
I don’t think I need to comment further because I can just refer you to Amanda Palmer, who has thought about such things.
Ganked shamelessly from Chris Roberson, a lovely little music video for one the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society‘s filked carols, “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Fish-Men” (from the album, A Very Scary Solstice). Don’t forget to take a sanity roll after watching.
Today’s moral panic in the UK is all about the “infantilising” effect of the Internet on human minds. Lady Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and a director of the Royal Institution, no less, is very worried:
the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity
There’s lots more like that here, including concerns that kids who play video games and read stuff online are missing out because they don’t get the in-depth experience of reading real books. I was tempted to suggest that Lady Greenfield read The Ten-Cent Plague, because I’m sure that very similar concerns were expressed about the dangers of children reading comic books. Then I decided she’d be much better off being sat down and given a good talking to by danah boyd.
Which is not to say that methods of social interaction are not changing, and in some ways no doubt for the worse. But I’m never much impressed by “new technology will destroy us all” rants.
In other news scientists in the US have discovered a correlation between kids who listen to music with sexually explicit lyrics and underage sex, and the journos have concluded that this “proves” that pop music makes kids have sex. That one, at least, hasn’t changed in decades.
It feels like that on the Internet at times. I got all of the Amanda & Neil video uploaded last night, and was going to do a proper post linking them all together this afternoon. However, the videos are already online, and the amazingly efficient Pádraig has already been pointing people at them. Therefore I have hurriedly put my own post together. You can follow the whole thing here. Enjoy.
Pádraig Ó Méalóid has set up a web page collecting reports of the Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer event in Dublin. There are already a bunch of videos up there. Thankfully all of the people in the crowd taking video sensibly choose to avoid pointing their cameras at me, so the material is work-safe.
If you have more material to add I’m sure that Pádraig would be delighted to hear from you. Meanwhile I am finally able to take a look at the video I shot. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if it is crap because someone else (in fact two someones) has already done a good job.
Update: Marjorie has just posted her video. I am in some of it. Goddess, I look fat! Now the snow has finished I need to get some more exercise.
Someone called Miholik has posted a bunch of YouTube videos from Amanda Palmer’s concert at the Sugar Club in Dublin. The one I have posted below is the encore performance of “Creep”, because I figured that some of you might not have believed me about Amanda walking through the audience, and everyone signing along. Here’s the proof. If you search YouTube for Miholik’s postings, or Amanda, you should find other songs from the concert, including the opening vocal number, and the fabulous “Dear Old House”.
Hat tip to Marjorie for pointing me at this.
Well, that was pretty much as expected, apart from the entire store being a mobile phone dead zone, which killed my chances of Tweeting anything. But you know what a Neil Gaiman signing is like, don’t you.
There were hundreds of them. Probably over 500, though no one knows for sure as the store took a policy decision to let everyone in rather than mess with tickets. Neil, very wisely, insisted on a “one item per person” limit for the signing, and as a result he and Amanda got through the line in a little over 3 hours. For a Neil signing, that’s not bad. I’ve known him be signing for 6 or more hours.
But before that there were readings, and songs. The readings came from the forthcoming book, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, which will consist of a bunch of pictures of Amanda being dead in various ways, and stories by Neil as to how she got to be that way. Listen up, because the following is important.
That’s what I understand the situation to be. If I’m wrong, I am sure that Neil or Amanda will be in touch fairly quickly to correct me.
Also Amanda sang three songs, with the help of her trusty ukelele. One of them was the old house song that I so loved last night. It gets better with repeated listening.
The venue looked good too. As Pádraig promised in the video, the store was transformed with drape. Someone had the smart idea of festooning it with a bunch of buttons. They had a life of their own, and every so often during the reading one of them would leap off and try to attack Neil. Fortunately they were only buttons, and having leaped, found themselves stuck on the floor, powerless. It was creepy though.
I have about an hour of video. It needs to be edited and uploaded to YouTube in byte-sized pieces. I will get on with it as quickly as I can. But not now, as I have to be up early to catch a plane.
Talking of planes, Amanda is headed for Australia and New Zealand. The tour dates and links for ticket purchase can be found here. I know that a lot of people from Oceania read this blog. I’m betting that a lot of you like good music. You should go and see Amanda while she is down your way. Because she is wonderful. Trust me on this.
And finally, I was really impressed with the staff at Chapters, most of whom came shyly forward after all of the punters had gone, offering their own copies of Neil’s books to be signed. Most of them had worked a 12-hour day, and they went home very happy. It is a very fine shop, staffed by people who love books. Dublin is very lucky to have it.
Update: Beth, who is on the business end of things rather than rushing around the world, writes to tell me that not all 10,000 copies will be signed, and that the pre-order isn’t actually live yet, but you can sign up to be notified as soon as it is.
This here is the story of a long and fabulous evening in the company of Ms. Amanda Palmer, pianist and songstress of Boston Town, held in the fair city of Dublin this night (or rather last night, for ‘tis morning now) of the 16th of February, 2009. Read on.
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I have been listening to Amanda Palmer’s solo album so that I’ll be able to sound vaguely intelligent should I happen to get to talk to her next week. Wow.
I bought the album from Amazon’s MP3 store, and immediately I realized that this was something I actually needed the sleeve notes for, at least so that I could study the lyrics. Fortunately Palmer has helpfully put the whole lot online here. Actually the whole album is there. You can listen to it for free. And watch videos. It is well worth checking out.
The track that has been causing all of the fuss, “Oasisâ€, turns out to be a poppy little number – the sort of thing that Kirsty MacColl might have penned, but even more biting. If anyone thinks that Palmer is trivializing feminist issues all they have to do is check out what Palmer has done with a supposedly sweet and harmless little ditty by Rogers & Hammerstein, “What’s the use of wond’rin’?â€. Or in the lyrics for “Ampersandâ€. In the context of the album, “Oasis†is very obviously a slap in the face for the ladette lifestyle. Unfortunately on its own it is sufficiently ironic to allow self-important and self-righteous people to take it entirely at face value and use that as an excuse to throw their weight around.
My favorite track from the album is “Blake saysâ€, but that’s because I’m a sad old Velvet Underground fan who happens to think that Berlin is the best thing that Lou Reed ever did, and consequently I got all of the references the first time through. For those of you who are a little younger, Palmer helpfully provides a YouTube video of Lou playing “Caroline Says II†on the web site.
I also really like “The point of it allâ€, which is a beautiful song and deeply creepy as well. I’m not exactly surprised that Palmer has ended up hanging out with someone who has made a career of writing scary fiction, though actually I think that much of the album is more Joe Hill than Neil Gaiman – especially “Guitar Hero†and “Strength through musicâ€.
On a more general note, I don’t think that tracks from Who Killed Amanda Palmer are going to be appearing on karaoke machines in the near future. I know I can’t sing, but I figure that I would be able to make a reasonable stab at most Abba songs if only I could stay in key. I do not think that I have much chance of matching the power and flexibility of Palmer’s voice.
The production on the album is generally fascinating (with credits mostly shared between Ben Folds and Palmer). However, this is not one of those perfect studio masterpieces that can never be reproduced on stage. Indeed, I think quite the opposite is true. The thing that comes over most strongly about the album is the sheer physical presence of Palmer’s performances. This is an album that demands that you go see the songs performed live. RyanAir and the snow permitting, that’s what I hope to do.
Herewith are my thoughts on the new Springsteen album, Working on a Dream. Please bear in mind that I’m not a musician, just someone who loves listening to music, and I am definitely not calling this “a review”. Again this is quite long so I’ve hidden most of it behind a cut.
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If anyone who read the Amanda Palmer blog post that I linked to the other day is wondering what the belly thing was all about, The Guardian has an explanation.
(Hat tip Liz Hand).
I now have both my flight and hotel booked for the trip to Dublin to see Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. As I now have a room share for P-Con (thanks Cuddles!) I decided I could afford the Central, especially as the room rates are much lower right now (or perhaps just because it is midweek). That way I’ll be able to to test out the wi-fi in the hotel prior to the con. I’m hoping to do some live coverage of Neil’s event too, but the mobile broadband rates look a bit ruinous, even after the recent kicking that the EU gave the phone companies.
This morning I was prompted by one of Neil Gaiman’s tweets to go and read this blog post by Amanda Palmer (whom I had the honor of speaking to yesterday in her temporary role as telephone answering service at Maison Clute). The essence of the post is that Amanda is having trouble getting her songs aired in the UK because various media producers are afraid that the public might be offended by them. Amanda, being American and used to having to deal with lunatic fundies, finds this all very perplexing.
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